Knowledge organization at DIS

Knowledge organization has been a core constituent of teaching and
research at DIS since the inception of the School. It has a long
history of leadership in the development of the Anglo-American
tradition, and includes among its past members some extremely eminent
names in cataloguing and classification, and in information science and
retrieval, not the least of whom is S. R. Ranganathan, who was a student
here in 1920s. Today it is one of only a handful of departments which
has maintained cataloguing and classification as a required element of
post-graduate teaching, and the strength of its teaching staff is
reflected in a wide range of professional and research activities.

DIS staff are involved with ongoing changes to the main cataloguing
standards, and to three of the major schemes of classification: the
Dewey Decimal Classification, Universal Decimal Classification, and the
Bliss Bibliographic Classification Second Edition.

Research activity is centred around the creation of new terminologies
and syntaxes for these systems, and also on the further advancement of
the facet analytical approach to retrieval. DIS also has strong links
to research communities within the wider profession, and it provides a
home for ISKO UK, the newly formed chapter of the International Society
for Knowledge Organization, the lead research body in this field, and
for the Bliss Classification Association. In the past DIS was also the
venue for the UK Classification Research Group.